Wakefulness: Poems Read Online Free Page B

beach.
    So many characters. They told him there were too many characters
    in your novel, that the plot was still complicated, but still
    they keep coming on, there must have been a leak, wait, it’s not even that,
    there are just too many people out there. Well I suppose it seems
    so to you, who are not normal, but if you could see
    it all from the outside you’d find how many are glued
    to your coattails, and not too many, never less than enough,
    and that includes children. My stars well I
    never counted on all this being here. No, and neither
    did your daddy, and it’s quiet in the city,
    too quiet, except for the largest vans and convertibles, and these
    are safely filed under “European”—we can let everything go, really,
    and then come back and look at it and pick it up.
    Well it sure was farther the way
    you always insist on taking us, me and one other person, but in
    fine it was not a great distance, only a matter of some blocks
    in one ward of the city. Say, I had a great
    idea and now it’s gone off and become useless.
    So may I someday, sitting at play in my little unknown courtyard.
    So may we all, while cats whine and grapes mature
    and a prickly dust of unknown origin seems to rise upward from the seats.

SHADOWS IN THE STREET
    She bit the bridge. A photograph can stomach it. I’ll be in
    some time in the middle of July. Now the best time
    of the year is around now, none can gainsay August
    and Mr. Random’s tooth running in the street, he liked to say hi, it was just
    him running, which is a bit awkward. A diagonal lipstick
    chased him across the street. From there on in it was just damn melancholy,
    no anchovies, nothing in particular, nothing to say. If so why, why do it,
    says Peter, who fought hard for the post, fought it and won,
    and why we are here, in the middle of a secondary terrain, mad and absorbed
    by life, by the truth, as always.
    But the nice part
    I was going to say is fenced out. Take to the hills then. There goes
    one petal, the tree is falling apart, zounds I can do almost nothing
    while the hills come and separate us, plant us in tomorrow
    or until the last dish is unearthed.
    Out crept a third one.
    Savannas that have been dangerous, now no one remembered,
    the evil shifting of feet denounced the lady travelling salesman
    to our liposuction expert. A single afternoon cooking at the stove
    and all is more or less gone over, too bad
    the futile Molotov cocktail exploded
    but in any case in another land, with more furniture than we expected.
    So we said, grant us this, it shall be done in another kingdom
    as in the king’s den. Don’t let the roof fall in!
    I was kind of sidelined by the barber pole
    but explained practically about the dark petal, that it was good
    and we were appearing in its time, and shall be heaven, about time, about
    that point. Rockets lifted. Read me. There is no point to all this listless
    hive. He took off in a manner that betokened bats
    when it was over and they came over. It’s time, now, some are good and alone,
    lost up unto the rest. They can go and cancel
    around it’s too moot to be played at. They are, for the rest unsavory,
    thyme in the corral, three jumps from last school
    the patio ignited, sworn to safe-conduct, like bread out of a school
    conducted at last to here.

THE EARTH-TONE MADONNA
    What were you telling him about,
    and why were veins implanted in the marsh
    where everyone looks? Today
    is the first day of spring, I think.
    Sailing near us on a monocle,
    the spray tapped and jiggled,
    forever like a lifeboat.
    And true some were found perjured
    in cornshocks, there was no meat left that day,
    no edge one could run around on.
    There were peepers in the loose chaos called
    oblivion, and not much else on the table.
    Miss—er—Jones, what is the order of events?
    I think not sir she cabled
    from a vantage point in Toronto where all ships
    and trains have their terminus. And if it’s Wednesday?
    Then man the egrets, the snowplow is